Friday, September 3, 2010

All non-Muslim countries should prevent the building of any new Mosques until that time we are assured that what is being taught inside them are not a threat to the values and liberties of the country.

However, opposition to new mosques should not be seen as an attack on Muslims. I make no judgment on them, but the public have an obligation to look at the larger picture and so too do local and central government when deciding applications for new mosques. The proper authorities, entrusted to look at the needs of the community, need to consider the role of Islam in light of history and a wider geography. If such a view is taken, a very disturbing role of the mosque in the life of communities emerges. Islam is a belief system with an international following and therefore a decision cannot be based solely on local conditions or only on recent local historical evidence. Such myopia would be negligence.

I would like to share two quotes by people who know a thing or two about Islam.

“Mehrab [or Mosque] means [a] place of war, the place of fighting. Out of the Mosques, wars should proceed. Just as all the wars of Islam proceeded out of the Mosques. The prophet had [a] sword to kill people. Our Holy Imams were quite militant. All of them were warriors. They used to wield swords. They used to kill people. We need a Caliph who would chop hands, cut throats, stone people. In the way that the messenger of Allah used to chop hands, cut throats, and stone people.”

This quote is from Ayatollah Khomeini, 1981, on the commemoration of the birth of Mohammed.

The second quote is from the Prime Minister of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan who publicly read an Islamic poem including the lines: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and Muslims our soldiers…”

Those who look favorably on a new mosque in their community should remember these quotes and feel the chill its shadow will cast on present and future generations.

These ideas are also expressed in two recent (April and July 2010) speeches by the English Defence League here and here.

In disputes over the construction and expansion of mosques in California, New York, Tennessee and elsewhere, supporters of the projects tend to invoke constitutional principles of religious freedom.

But to experts in land-use planning, the area of law that directly concerns the controversies scattered across the nation, the way to resolve such conflicts is in a more modern document than the Constitution. These fights are often all but moot, from a legal perspective at least, because of a federal law with an ungainly acronym.

“Every planner and zoning lawyer I’ve talked to about this is saying the same thing — Rluipa,” said Daniel Lauber, a past president of the American Planning Association.

The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, whose initials are commonly pronounced Ruh-LOO-pa, was approved unanimously by Congress in 2000. Its chief sponsor was Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah.
The law sets a high bar for any government action that would impose zoning or other restrictions on a religious institution. Any such action must serve a “compelling government interest” while also being “the least restrictive means” of furthering that interest, the law says.

This law also falls under the law on unintended consequences.
Despite the clear advantage that the law gives to religious institutions, disputes over the construction of mosques have emerged around the country.

In Murfreesboro, Tenn., an arson at the site of a mosque project has raised tensions. In Temecula, Calif., some mosque opponents brought dogs to a protest, thinking it would offend Muslims who believe the animals to be unclean. Backers withdrew the planned expansion of a mosque in Brentwood, Tenn., after critics raised their voices.

The opposition often reflects America’s complicated attitudes toward the Middle East, in which passions run high and even basic facts are treated as objects of contention. The conservative New English Review stated the fundamental question as “whether Islam is a religion or a political doctrine seeking domination with a thin veneer of religious practices.”

First, the attitude of Americans toward Islam in America is separate and distinct from our "complicated attitudes toward the Middle East." And as far as "basic facts" being "treated as objects of contention," I don't think is it out of place to question whether Islam's current classification as a religion is complete or correct. As Jerry Gordon put is very succinctly (as quoted above), Islam has a very large, even dominant, political component and in fact requires territorial sovereignty - as no other religion does. And while there is no doubt Muslims themselves believe Islam to be a religion, it has also been argued, and very convincingly, that millions of people believed in communism and Nazism with religious fervor and devotion. So belief in an ideological system alone should not be the criteria for classification as a religion.

Furthermore, our laws protecting religious freedom were enacted because religion as we have known it has been good for society. Religion has nurtured morality, strengthened the family, fostered public service and encouraged social harmony. Islam, on the other hand, is self-segregating, fosters ideas of Muslim supremacy and thereby sows seeds of social discord. Even its tradition of charitable giving is solely for the benefit of fellow Muslims and it utterly destroys the family through its adoption of polygamy. Polygamy cannot be tolerated without fatal damage to our social structure. The nuclear family is the basic social unit of our civilization.

And thirdly, it is certain that the Founding Fathers, when they wrote about "religion," were speaking of religion in the Judeo-Christian context. They did not mean to protect a religion that would do damage to their infant republic. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously to uphold the banning of polygamy in 1878 and as Norman Berdichevsky has pointed out, religious freedom is not, and has never been, an absolute in this country.

Islam is the duck-billed platypus of belief systems - a religio-socio-political ideology. It covers every aspect of life - personal, social, political and geo-political. The word religion, is not adequate. That, Mr. Schwartz, is a basic fact.

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Muslim Terrorism Count

Mission Overview

Most Western societies are based on Secular Democracy, which itself is based on the concept that the open marketplace of ideas leads to the optimum government. Whilst that model has been very successful, it has defects. The 4 Freedoms address 4 of the principal vulnerabilities, and gives corrections to them.

At the moment, one of the main actors exploiting these defects, is Islam, so this site pays particular attention to that threat.

Islam, operating at the micro and macro levels, is unstoppable by individuals, hence: "It takes a nation to protect the nation". There is not enough time to fight all its attacks, nor to read them nor even to record them. So the members of 4F try to curate a representative subset of these events.

We hope that free nations will wake up to stop the threat, and force the separation of (Islamic) Church and State. This will also allow moderate Muslims to escape from their totalitarian political system.

The 4 Freedoms

These 4 freedoms are designed to close 4 vulnerabilities in Secular Democracy, by making them SP or Self-Protecting (see Hobbes's first law of nature). But Democracy also requires - in addition to the standard divisions of Executive, Legislature & Judiciary - a fourth body, Protector of the Open Society (POS), to monitor all its vulnerabilities (see also Popper). 1. SP Freedom of SpeechAny speech is allowed - except that advocating the end of these freedoms2. SP Freedom of ElectionAny party is allowed - except one advocating the end of these freedoms3. SP Freedom from Voter ImportationImmigration is allowed -except where that changes the political demography (this is electoral fraud)4. SP Freedom from Debt
The Central Bank is allowed to create debt - except where that debt burden can pass across a generation (25 years).

An additional Freedom from Religion is deducible if the law is applied equally to everyone:

Religious and cultural activities are exempt from legal oversight except where they intrude into the public sphere (Res Publica)"